Best Books About Feelings for Preschoolers (Easiest First)

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A preschooler does not have one feelings problem, they have whichever one belongs to their age that month. At three it is usually that the feeling has no name at all, so it comes out as a wail or a shove. At four the name exists but arrives twenty minutes late. At five they can tell you what happened and will still insist it was somebody else's fault. Buying the wrong rung is the commonest mistake here, and it mostly goes one way: a beautiful forty-page book about emotions bought for a three-year-old who will not sit through it.

So this list runs easiest first. Page counts are the publisher's, and I have put them in because length is most of the difference between a book that gets read eleven times and a book that gets closed halfway.

Why feeling words at three are worth the trouble

This is more than tidy parenting, and research suggests as much. Susanne Denham and colleagues assessed 143 preschoolers on three things at once, how they expressed emotion, how they regulated it, and how much they actually knew about emotions, and published the results in Child Development in 2003. Emotional competence measured at three and four years old contributed to social competence both at the time and again later in kindergarten. It is one study of 143 children and it measures association, not cause, so nobody should read it as a promise. What it does suggest is that the three-year-old who can say “sad” is practising something that keeps paying out.

How you read matters more than which book you pick, though. Grover Whitehurst and colleagues ran the picture-book studies that became the method now known as dialogic reading, published in Developmental Psychology in 1988. The idea behind it is almost annoyingly simple. The adult asks, the child does the talking. With a feelings book that is one question per spread. “What is her face doing?” “When were you that one?” Then wait, which is the hard part. A silent read-through of any book on this list is worth much less than a scrappy one with four questions in it.

The six books, easiest first

1. Lots of Feelings by Shelley Rotner

No story and no characters. Just photographs of real children's faces, one feeling to a page: happy, grumpy, thoughtful and more. The text is a line long. The publisher's own framing is that you can read a face the way you read a book.

First because it asks the least. A just-turned-three-year-old does not have to follow a plot, remember who anybody is, or wait for a resolution, which means all of their attention lands on the face. Photographs beat illustration here for a reason. A drawn sad face is a convention a child has to learn. A photographed one is the thing itself, and children who have gone blank at cartoon emotions often get this one straight away. Use it as a pointing book rather than a reading book, and expect to be told which child is which feeling before you have finished the page. One oddity worth knowing: Amazon shows a customer-voted reading age of 1 to 3 while the grade level field says kindergarten to 3, which is a wide disagreement. In practice it behaves like the youngest book on this list. Millbrook Press, 1 August 2003, 32 pages. Lots of Feelings on Amazon.

2. Llama Llama Feelings by Anna Dewdney

Sixteen board pages of Llama Llama working through an evening: happy, then sad, then excited, then angry, then bedtime. Part of the Llama Llama series, in the concept-board-book format rather than the story format, so each feeling gets a spread and a few words.

Second because it is the shortest real book here and the one most likely to survive a three-year-old's hands. Two minutes, start to finish. It earns its place on familiarity as much as content. A child who already knows Llama Llama will take a feelings lesson from him that they would refuse from a stranger, and at three that is not a small thing. It is thinner than the books below it, in the literal sense and the other one, and that is the trade. If your child is already naming feelings, skip it. If they are not, sixteen pages they will actually finish beats forty they will not. Viking Books for Young Readers, 9 April 2024, 16 pages, with a customer-voted reading age of 2 to 4 on Amazon. Llama Llama Feelings on Amazon.

3. Glad Monster, Sad Monster by Ed Emberley and Anne Miranda

Monsters in flat, bold colour, one feeling each. The masks are die-cut into the pages, so your child holds the book up to their own face and becomes the glad one, then the sad one, then the silly one, then the mad one. The publisher calls it an interactive book about working through big feelings with play and imagination. That is a fair description.

Third, and the one I would pick for a child who will not sit still, because it stops being a read-aloud and becomes a game. Holding a mask up and making the face is not a decoration on the lesson, it is the lesson: pulling an angry face is about as close as a three-year-old gets to inspecting anger from the outside. It is also the one that lands around Halloween, and Amazon's own listing title leans on that, because a monster is a safer subject than yourself. Two cautions. The masks are die-cut card and a determined four-year-old will eventually tear one. And if monsters are already a sore point in your house, read it yourself first. LB Kids, 1 September 1997, 32 pages, grade level preschool to 3. Glad Monster, Sad Monster on Amazon.

4. The Feelings Book by Todd Parr

Todd Parr's trademark thick black outlines and loud flat colour, with a feeling or a mood on each spread. Sometimes I feel silly. Sometimes I feel like eating pizza for breakfast. Sometimes I feel brave. Sometimes I feel like trying something new. The silly ones sit next to the real ones without any ceremony.

Fourth, and the one to buy if the problem is not vocabulary but permission. Plenty of four-year-olds have worked out which feelings go down well at home and have started editing. Parr's answer is to put wanting pizza for breakfast beside feeling brave and feeling cross as though they are all the same kind of thing. They are. A child who laughs at that has quietly been told that nothing they feel is going to be a problem here. The flat art is deliberate and does a job: there is nothing to decode, so even the youngest end of preschool stays with it. It is a list rather than a story, so it is not the book for a child who wants to know what happens next. LB Kids, 21 September 2005, 24 pages, grade level preschool and up. The Feelings Book on Amazon.

5. Today I Feel Silly: And Other Moods That Make My Day by Jamie Lee Curtis, illustrated by Laura Cornell

One girl and a run of moods, in rhyming verse. Silly, cranky, excited, sad. Each mood gets a spread of Laura Cornell's busy, scribbly, detail-crammed illustration, and the point of the book, in the publisher's words, is that her moods change from day to day.

Fifth, and the first book here that needs a bit of staying power: forty pages of verse is five or six minutes, which is long for three and comfortable for four and a half. What it gives you that the shorter books cannot is the idea of a mood as weather rather than identity. Not “I am a cranky child” but “today I am cranky”, which is the distinction that makes a bad morning survivable. The illustrations reward a second and third read, which helps, because there is always some ridiculous detail in the corner nobody spotted the first time. Published 1 July 1998 by HarperCollins, 40 pages, grade level preschool to 3, with a customer-voted reading age of 2 to 6 on Amazon, which is optimistic at the bottom end. Today I Feel Silly on Amazon.

6. Big Feelings by Alexandra Penfold, illustrated by Suzanne Kaufman

A group of children set out to do something together, and it does not go to plan. They get mad, frustrated, overwhelmed. Nobody is sent to calm down alone. They talk it through, give something up, see it from somebody else's side, and start again.

Last because it is the hardest and the one that goes furthest. Every book above it is about a feeling in one child. This is the first where the feeling happens between children, which is where almost all of a four-or-five-year-old's genuinely big feelings actually live: the sandpit, the shared Lego, the game whose rules somebody changed. It is also the only one here that shows a repair, and preschoolers need to see that a wrecked afternoon can be restarted. The caution is the age. The publisher's own reading-age field says 4 to 8, which puts it at the top of the preschool band rather than the middle, and under about four the group dynamic goes over their heads. Save it for the second half of the preschool years. Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2 March 2021, 42 pages, grade level preschool to 3. Big Feelings on Amazon.

Is there a Silver book about feelings?

Not an honest one, and since we publish the Silver books it would be easy to pretend otherwise. Sharing Silver is about giving and getting back. Across twenty-four pages exactly one page touches a feeling. Angry Ann the ant insists she was not caught in a game of chase, the anthill ends up shouting, and Silver tells her that anger is like mud on a trampoline. No feelings vocabulary, nobody sad or worried, no noticing and no calming. So it is not on this list. If anger is the specific thing you are dealing with, our books about anger for preschoolers page has eight built for it. There is also a write-up of the Angry Ann page if you only want that scene.

How to choose, and what to do after you read it

Pick by what your child can do right now, not by what the cover looks like. Cannot connect a face to a feeling: Lots of Feelings. Will not sit for more than two minutes: Llama Llama Feelings. Needs to move while they learn: Glad Monster, Sad Monster. Has started hiding feelings they think are unwelcome: The Feelings Book. Decides a bad morning means a bad child: Today I Feel Silly. Falls apart when a game with other children goes wrong: Big Feelings.

Then read the one you chose far more often than feels interesting. The temptation with a list is to get through all six, and it is the wrong instinct: a preschooler needs a word available before the feeling arrives, and that takes repetition, not variety. Read one four or five times across a fortnight, ask one question per reading instead of a quiz, and then use the book's words at the real moment. “That is your grumpy face, like the monster” at the actual moment is worth more than a seventh book.

Nearby on this site: the wider children's books about feelings list covers ages three to eight and sorts by job rather than age, with no title overlap with this page. By single feeling there are anger books for preschoolers and books about worry and anxiety for preschoolers. For the whole social-emotional shelf at this age, social-emotional books for preschoolers, and for the year after, the kindergarten list. If the real problem at home is meltdowns rather than reading, start with emotional regulation in preschoolers, and the full parent guide is raising a kind, sharing friend.